At the end of a long hallway in the back room of your soul, there is a junk drawer that time and mind have forgotten. Yet, even while memory does not serve, the items contained therein inform your movement, your breathing patterns, your neuroses. There's that fake Mickey Mantle card your former friend from 5th grade tricked you into taking in exchange for your Jose Canseco rookie card. There's a certificate you received for perfect attendance many, many years before you learned to embrace truancy. At the program, you gawked up at the tree tall man who was your school's principal. Heroes then were easy to come by, hardly anyone had let you down. There's a set of keys you used to carry around. They didn't unlock anything. There's a pack of chrysanthemum seeds you bought but never planted. There's a hot wheels car you found at the bottom of a cereal box. Mom and Dad made you share the toy with your kid brother. Somewhere in there wedged between the pages of a Gideon Bible is a girl's phone number which you showed off to all the boys in Sunday school. The girl and the telephone number were both borne of your imagination and encroaching fear that someone would find out how lonely you were.

There are pictures of people you don't know in places you don't recognize. It's a strange feeling to remember just enough to know there's something very important or special that you can't drudge up. There are bottle caps you picked up on the way home from school and a button that popped off your favorite shirt. There's the postcard a friend sent you when they visited the Alamo and the funeral program you got the next year when they died unexpectedly. Everything in this box is dead or marred beyond recognition. You wouldn't know it if you ran into it or if it were standing right in front of you. Even if you did know it, you'd probably just be horrified for having seen a ghost. You might expect such forgotten relics would be locked away in a hidden vault but the truth is you don't really want to find them. You'd rather not see which is why you've thrown it all into a drawer in the first place.